Comments, tangents and musings from an amateur reader of The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels

Saturday, June 15, 2013

# 58 The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

Ryder: a curious diagnosis

Carson: nostalgic through and through

Wharton: supremely objective?

Kundera: the State lays claim to Memory

1993 was an
eventful year in the life of Winona Ryder. She won a Golden Globe and was
nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as May Welland in Martin
Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, an
adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel.
She was also troubled. The diagnosis was anticipatory nostalgia,
“whatever that is,” the actress wondered to an interviewer years later.

Anticipatory
nostalgia. The paradoxical condition begs
for a definition, so we turned to the retired psychologist and blogger, Ron
Evans, who wrote: “[It] is a scientific sounding syndrome in which one thinks
about the stuff that is fading away and might be looked back on as being cooler
than it was.”

This folksy
summary feels incomplete and overly rosy—even Ryder’s doctor had prescribed her
sleeping pills, suggesting some sort of psychopathology and compelling us to
ruminate. Isn’t a spell of warm nostalgia accompanied by the melancholic chill
of mortality? When an old friend relives glory days that rang out years or decades
ago, do you only laugh uproariously as you did then? Or do you also pause, even
if long afterward and very briefly, to contemplate the ultimate passing of
those times, you and us all?

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, has spun many chapters on such, er, stuff. He digested his thoughts for his interviewer,
the Top 100 novelist Philip Roth:

“This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss
of the self. But what is this self? It is the sum of everything we remember.
Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the past. Forgetting is a
form of death ever present within life…But forgetting is also the great problem
of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national
consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting.”

Kundera looks
through a European lens that emphasizes the communal and the sociopolitical:
remembering, forgetting and nostalgia are tools of the state. Many Americans,
we suspect, reject or remain ignorant of that perspective. We cherish our
individuality and blithely or defiantly believe we are self-armed with memory; the damn government
has nothing to do with it.

These
conflicting worldviews may have discombobulated Daniel Day-Lewis, the
Irish-English actor who played the hero Newland Archer in The Age of
Innocence, and had five years before starred in the adaptation of the
Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness
of Being. The New York Times landed a rare interview
with the acclaimed method actor as he prepared for the Scorsese film.

“[Day-Lewis] had been
studying books on 19th-century etiquette as background for his character,
Newland Archer, in Edith Wharton's novel about beau-monde New York during the
Gilded Age. Already, he sounded happy to be ‘drawn into the vortex’ of Archer's
life – ‘his subtle hypocrisies, his realization of those hypocrisies, the
self-detestation…’ As the conversation
in the restaurant drifts back to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being,"
a film he finds too bleak to think about, it becomes apparent how deeply he
inherits what he reads and acts. ‘He actually changed my way of looking at
things,’ he says of Kundera. ‘For a long time afterward I was very disoriented.
I wasn't strong enough to resist him.’"

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton explored
some of the differences in consciousness and manners between the Old and New
Worlds. Archer’s love, Countess Olenska, disparages wealthy New Yorkers’ “blind
conformity” to a European-inspired subculture, described as “rich and idle and
ornamental.” In its emphasis on bloodlines, ceremony and manners, Newland
Archer’s society smacks of Versailles; the New York upper crust is more crème
brůlée than apple pie. “It seems stupid
to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country,” the
countess opines. Her critique means more than simply tolerance of divorce: freedom
matters, too.

Q:
Countess Olenska likes to shatter conformity and convention. Is that true of
you?

A:
I don’t know. Perhaps shattering things, yes. [She laughs.] I don’t know that
I’ve ever consciously gone about doing that. I know that I’ve fought in my work
against being pigeonholed… All actors are limited to a degree by the way they
look. I think if you want to reach beyond the obvious roles that somebody might
cast you in, you have to work for it.

The
observation about an actress’s appearance sounds refreshingly candid. And the
necessity of having to earn something beyond the expected seems like solid
advice for thespians, theologians and theoretical physicists alike. The
self-effacing Pfeiffer, when asked about one of her co-stars, the
aforementioned Winona Ryder, replied, "She’s
terribly sophisticated for her age. She’s a strange combination. I felt kind of
maternal toward her."

The
feeling makes sense: when The Age of
Innocence was released, Pfeiffer was 35 and Ryder was 22. Daniel Day-Lewis was
36 and did seem more comfortable with his contemporary than with his junior in
the dramatic love triangle.

In real
life, Ryder’s relationship status was, to use a Facebook option, “complicated.”
Her bout of anticipatory nostalgia was precipitated, at least in her own
rear-view mirror, by the end of her engagement to Johnny Depp, not by a statist
conspiracy à la Kundera.

This
American sympathizer, still seeking to understand Ryder’s affliction, envisions
a nine-month old cherub, the most adorable in the world, who is placed on all
fours in front of what she wishes to play with most but, as soon as she budges, finds herself moving away in the opposite direction from the toy, which
seems even more desirable as it becomes more unattainable. She has just learned
to crawl—but only backward. If,
beforehand, she had been anxiously aware that such unintentional repulsion
would happen over and over to her, then we think we can grasp anticipatory
nostalgia.

Newland
Archer lived too early to benefit from the insight and chemistry that rescued
Winona Ryder. Left untreated, his
symptoms were not so dissimilar from the actress’s; his longing for Countess
Olenska is described in one instance as,

“…an
incessant, undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and
drink once tasted and long since forgotten… He simply felt that if he could carry
away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on…the rest of the world might
seem less empty.”

His
anticipation is unhealthy. Elsewhere,
the narrator plainly calls Archer “a man sick with unsatisfied love.” In his
serially thwarted affair, Archer is tortured by the cycle of temptation,
failure and renewable expectation.

“Each time
you happen to me all over again,” Archer tells the countess, who concurs, in
the book’s only italicized sentence, the articulated essence of this romance. To readers who live and love, the sentiment strikes us as admirably honest and
authentic. There is also a philosophical resonance that adds to the pleasure of
re-reading or contemplating the scene. Wharton in
1908 told a friend that she enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, according to Carol Shaffer-Koss. The
author allowed that she had indulged in “a glance” at the German iconoclast’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra, which offers the concept of the Eternal Return, or the
Eternal Recurrence, according to your taste in repetition.

Eternal Recurrence is a thought experiment “...on a possible reality in which every action
[people] had committed (all faults, setbacks, mistakes, and wrongdoings) was
bound to be relived by them, an infinite amount of time. Where they would
be forced to endure their shame and grief over and over again, unable to change
or improve on any past misdeeds, for all eternity. And then to ask the
question, “Would you be willing to bear such a reality?”

Shaffer-Koss
saw the theory applied in the Wharton short story, “Roman Fever” but,
curiously, not in The Age of Innocence,
in which Archer and Olenska are each willing to bear the reality of falling in
love over and over again, though the recurrence brings joy and pain. We might view Archer's line as the expression of Nietzsche's compelling, though controversial idea. If
Wharton didn't intend it as such, she may have at least smiled when it she
pulled the German's arrow from her quiver and let it fly to the page.

Martin Scorsese, the expert dramatist, was drawn to the recurring conflict in
Wharton’s tale. In making a costume drama of his native New York during the
Gilded Age, he did not seek to lovingly recreate an era. He had other ideas, as he told the critic,
Roger Ebert:

“What has
always stuck in my head is the brutality under the manners. People hide what
they mean under the surface of language. In the subculture I was around when I
grew up in Little Italy, when somebody was killed, there was a finality to it.
It was usually done by the hands of a friend. And in a funny way, it was almost
like ritualistic slaughter, a sacrifice. But New York society in the 1870’s didn't
have that. It was so cold-blooded. I don't know which is preferable."

Wharton, via Newland
Archer, acknowledges the need for a good defense in considering the women of
that time and their devotion to fashion: “It’s their armor…their defense
against the unknown, and their defiance of it.”

In an
interview with Gavin Smith, Scorsese detailed his choices for virtually every
aspect and shot of the film, from angle to number of takes, to lighting and
camera movement. The voluble director
has throughout his career discussed his technique and work endlessly—making him the antithesis of his contemporary, Terrence Malick,
who may not even speak—and for this reason the centathlete thinks of him as
more artisan than artist.

In other
words, Scorsese, by opening his kimono after every film, resembles a celebrity
chef who strips off the apron and shares each recipe, its preparation and inspiration—with
an air of agreeable promotion. In life, dining and cinema, the centathlete
prefers ambiguity: more mystery and less history, if you please. How do you
lean?

The master craftsman not only explained why he was drawn to The
Age of Innocence, he revealed the take-away he sought. “What I wanted
to do as much as possible was to recreate for a viewing audience the experience
I had reading the book,” he said in a citation by Karli Lukas.

Some of us
would argue that the goal should be to tell the story cinematically, rather
than having it read to us with accompanying pictures… Any way, it’s not
surprising that the film featured much narration (by Joanne Woodward), a
bugbear for the centathlete, who prefers gesture to disembodied monologue. "Show, don’t tell" would seem to be a movie maker’s preferred credo.

Another
practitioner of the visual arts has expressed admiration for Edith Wharton.
Julian Fellowes, creator of the beloved TV series, Downton Abbey, in 2012 visited The Mount, Wharton’s estate in
Lenox, Massachusetts. The Wharton Society’s chronicle of the occasion indicates
there was no shortage of fawning.

"[Wharton]
had the ability to judge the society from which she came from, but not condemn
it," Fellowes intoned. "[Her work] is simply an examination of the
strengths and weaknesses of society." Adam Poulisse of The Berkshire Eagleadded in his report,
“Fellowes was too modest to compare his writings to Wharton's, but it's hard to
let the similarities and themes go unnoticed.”

Even
the multitudinous, cultured admirers of Downton
Abbey’s Crawleys and their ecosystem can acknowledge that Fellowes has oversimplified
Wharton’s authorial perspective and simultaneously defended his own. In
asserting objectivity, Fellowes in fact displays what the Nobel laureate
psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the chronicler of cognitive biases, has called “bias
blind spot”, in which we assume we think more rationally than others.

In
his teleplays and screenplays of big-house aristocracy, Fellowes also exhibits
“confirmation bias,” in which we search for memories that affirm our
preconceptions, and "status quo bias," which makes us dislike change.

In a statement that could fairly
be called representative of Fellowes’ perspective, Lord Grantham of Downton
Abbey says, “We
all have different parts to play, Matthew, and we must all be allowed to play
them.”

Freedom
within a track might make some of us recoil: what if you don’t like the part
you’ve been assigned or born into?
Fellowes, we gather, upholds the robust molecule and rejects atomic
anarchy. His utopia is a big tent that accommodates, eventually, most
performers. He has Carson, the head
butler, express an objective, mature perspective that will help one thrive
downstairs:

“To
progress in your chosen career, William, you must remember that a good servant
at all times retains a sense of pride and dignity that reflects the pride and
dignity of the family he serves. And never make me remind you of it again.”

According
to his background on a wiki for the series, Carson's dominant trait is that he is “nostalgic for
the past."

Much of the
pleasure in Downton Abbey is
aspirational; it makes us want to live in fabulous Highclere Castle, wear those clothes, and dine sumptuously as they did back in those days. That sense is not
conveyed in The Age of Innocence. The
innocence is not something to be recreated because it “...seals the mind against
imagination and the heart against experience.”

Wharton’s lovers cannot ever unite, even when offered a late encore in Paris. As the
product of his “small, disciplined” society, Archer is fated to live in a
melancholic limbo apart from true love—and without the capability to fully
remember what might have been. His memory of his almost romance is
sterile and “abstract.”

Another theme,
a woman’s lack of freedom, suggests Wharton’s lack of nostalgia. Written
some 45 years after the portrayed era, The
Age of Innocence does not advocate a return to the days when a woman knew
her place, which was substantially more conscribed. Incidentally, we suspect
that the formula of reflecting on pre-feminist mores two generations ago will
always hold a certain appeal.

A
progressive analysis of nostalgia is very much a present occupation. In a May
19, 2013 column titled “Beware Social Nostalgia,” in The New York Times, the historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, “...nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways,
making us needlessly negative about our current situation.”She also encouraged
the cross-examination of even happy memories and finds those most sound who
have carefully reflected on others’ sacrifices and deference so they “…could
see that their own good experiences were in some ways dependent on unjust
social arrangements, or on bad experiences for others.”

Neither
Julian Fellowes nor his man Carson would find servile arrangements as unjust as
does Coontz.

In April 2013,
Winona Ryder once again described the phenomenon of distortedly looking back,
albeit in her hazy fashion. She seems to have a broader perspective when she
regards her salad days when she played the goth teenager in Beetlejuice, the 1988 Tim Burton movie. Or,
when we read her words through a lens of wish fulfillment, should we see her as
still afflicted by her originally diagnosed condition?

“I think
there's a nostalgia going on for that era,” she toldThe Huffington Post, “or something.”